Patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) have an unusually high incidence of B cell lymphomas carrying a t(8; 14) translocation. The appearance of these B cell lymphomas is preceded by lymphnode follicular hyperplasia. However, at present, lymphnode biopsies taken from AIDS patients at an early stage of the disease are of little predictive value for the development of lymphomas because very little is known about the etiology of the hyperplastic follicles or the relationship between the hyperplastic state and the development of lymphomas. The objective of this proposal is to analyze the pathogenesis of follicular hyperplasias in AIDS patients to identify the factors associated with tumor progression and to test the hypothesis that oncogene rearrangements may be already present in the hyperplastic follicles. Cells form individual hyperplastic follicles and progressive lymphomas obtained form lymphnodes of AIDS patients will be analyzed: i) to determine the clonality of hyperplastic follicles and their relationship to other follicles and lymphomas in the same patient utilizing the method of CDRIII-PCR. ii) to determine whether rearrangements or mutations of the cellular proto-oncogenes c-myc and bcl-2 are present in hyperplastic follicles preceding the development of lymphomas. The findings will be correlated with the presence or absence of HTLV-I, human herpes virus-6 and Epstein-Barr virus sequences and with the maturational stages of the targets of transformation, the B-lymphocytes.